Judge Paints Public Education Into A Corner By Going Ape On Secular Humanism

March 13, 1987|By ROBERT MAYNARD, Universal Press Syndicate

My father loved to tell a story about a man and his medicine. It was his favorite lesson on the virtue ``of taking all things in moderation.``

The man, as my father`s story went, was feeling poorly. He visited a doctor who prescribed a medicine to be taken three times a day for 10 days. Reasoning he would be cured all the quicker by hastening the process, the man took all 30 doses at once. He died.

My father`s point about the dangers of immoderation in pursuit of change was handsomely illustrated in a Mobile, Ala., courtroom the other day. A U.S. District Court judge banned dozens of school books because they lacked sufficient religious references to satisfy the court.

Moreover, the judge found that a religion exists in America called ``secular humanism.`` This is a religion with no professed practitioners, only avowed enemies. Anyway, all those books, including home economics texts, are the dark work of ``secular humanism.``

That is the opinion of W. Brevard Hand, the federal judge in Mobile. Said he in one of the oddest opinions in modern jurisprudence: ``For purposes of the First Amendment, secular humanism is a religious belief system, entitled to the protections of, and subject to the prohibitions of, the religion clauses.``

While nothing approaching a precise definition of this religion with no affirmative adherents exists, Judge Hand knows it when he sees it.

He saw a textbook that talked about the Puritans without reference to the fact they were fleeing religious persecution. That, to Judge Hand, is secular humanism and must be banned.

He saw a text on the Montgomery bus boycott that failed to mention that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a minister. That, too, he declared to be the work of secular humanism. And so it went for dozens of textbooks selected by the Alabama school system. All were banned by court order.

For the next several years, the radical religious right and civil libertarians will wage constitutional pitched battle in the courts and on the fund-raising circuit until someone lays this insipid argument to rest.

While Judge Hand takes all his ideological medicine in one unlearned gulp, his solution obscures a serious problem in America. The reason the textbooks of the schools of the United States are so light on religious references has to do with the nature of a pluralistic society. The Constitution protects all manner of beliefs, including the right not to believe.

School administrators have learned through the courts and other aspects of the political process that religious references often inflame distracting debate. As a result, there has been a movement over the last generation to keep education carefully out of the cross fire of the church-state debate.

In the course of finding a safe, neutral course that satisfies the Constitution, the schools have all but abandoned the teaching of moral and ethical values.

That is unfortunate because our young badly need more moral and ethical grounding and a greater appreciation of our many religious heritages. As a matter of intellectual honesty, textbooks should tell a great deal more about the role of religion in history and everyday life.

Public education is often in a quandary over the question of how to manage that delicate chore without crossing tricky lines of law intended to keep church and state separate.

It passes the ironic that Judge Hand should have picked the story of the Puritans as an example. The religion clause of the Constitution owes its origins to their legacy of persecution. The framers intended that the state remain disinterested in the religious activities of citizens.

What Judge Hand has done through bizarre legal prestidigitation is stand the First Amendment on its head. That very neutrality, he argues, is itself the exercise of religion forbidden by the Constitution.

Thus polarizing the climate, Judge Hand assures that there can be no compromise solution. Instead, the issue will be tied up in litigation, and another half a generation or so of children will see exactly what Judge Hand says he does not like: Books without religious references.

That is strong judicial medicine. It is also potentially fatal to the goals Judge Hand claims to espouse.